Tag: life at Microsoft

I was able to attend “New Hire Training” for Office last week. At Microsoft, all newly hired people go through a day or two of training to get used to Microsoft, get your card key/badge and general agenda like that. Mark Russinovich talked about his experiences with that session here, and it seems pretty straightforward. …

In February 2008 I mentioned some extra functionality built into our “napkin math” system. I sent the details to our technical writers and waited to see how long it would take to get the online help article at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/onenote/HA102140621033.aspx updated. The answer: 4 weeks. Not too bad to get the new file localized to…

Last week I mentioned that about 40% of my time was taken by meetings. That’s probably normal for a manager here at Microsoft and I don’t see anything unusual about that number. But for a meeting to occur, at least two other items need to be present: other attendees, and a meeting room. Since most…

One of my friends was asking me about Microsoft over the weekend and wanted to know what it was "really like" working here. I suggested he read my blog since that is ostensibly the purpose behind it: to show what life is like as a tester here. He did not want to read it, and…

I got my Gateway to replace the Lenovo which had given me problems. The Gateway had been working great until today – nothing exciting like the random failures the Lenovo exhibited. It simply would not power on. What can you do at that point? No fan, no beep, just nothing. I called tech support and they…

One of the things we allow on the OneNote test team is working from home now and then. We have tried hard to keep the process lightweight and leave the decision up to you for whether or not you can meet all your goals and work at home on any given day. If you…

Back in October, I made the statement that I had to transition from being an enthusiastic user of OneNote to a tester when I left Outlook to move to the OneNote team. I’ve been thinking about that for awhile and wanted to explain what I meant. I think of making software as a…